TV SCHEDULES  reflect an apparently insatiable viewer appetite for hospital soaps and it's a brave playwright who tackles the genre in the theatre.

This online version of Nina Raine's play, which she also directed, in some ways reinvents the wheel in presenting a familiar scenario, with medical crises mixed in with the relationships of staff stressed by their work and emotional entanglements.

But time and events, as so often, exert their influence on audiences. The advent of the coronavirus must surely break through the comfortable fiction of  a TV series — locked-down online viewers are only too well aware of the heroic efforts of NHS staff to cope with what must seem an overwhelming crisis.

There are recognisable tropes in Tiger Country of the young new doctor whose enthusiasm is frustrated by the worldly exhausted wisdom of established colleagues, the ambitious female surgeon battling against the male hierarchy and the young specialist who finds himself with cancer.

The message is clear — you can't be a perfectionist in a hospital, you can only do your best.

Without the visual plasticity of a Holby City or Casualty, this filmed stage production retains the raw immediacy of live performance.

It has a surprisingly fresh impact as the controlled chaos of the operating theatre and the ward, punctuated by the tensions at play among doctors and nurses struggling to cope with the demands placed on an under-resourced system while remembering that their patients are human beings not numbers, unfolds.

Online until April 26, hampsteadtheatre.com